Pages

Thursday, September 4, 2014

A Relic of the Past

I mentioned in one of the Nova posts that I wanted to upgrade my Eldar Vehicles and this is the start of it. Friday night after the GT I was pushing my display board up to the room and I was sharing the elevator with three other guys. One gave me props on my display board .. Thanks man.. while another looked at me and my board with a crappy smile on his face asked how many Wave Serpents? Just three... He sort of rolled his eyes at that .. I said hey man that is all the transports we really have .. he waited till I was out and the doors closing before he closed with .. what about the Falcon? 8\ .. Well..

It' only holds six
Isn't a dedicated transport so not objective secured
Takes up a valuable heavy slot
Isn't as survivable

Basically it's out classed as a transport and a gunship. It may be the chassis the Serpent and Prism are built on but it won't beat out either out for many reasons. So there you go elevator man! haha.. But .. that guy really has nothing to do with anything, it was just a funny story and it's relevant now because what am I using as my tank upgrade ginnie pig? That's right .. a Falcon. I want one in my tank depot to complete the group (and my original one looks ROUGH.. I repainted it more times than I can count trying to find my color scheme, thinking back now that original Falcon is where the paint scheme for my army came from haha.. wow this is a long side note... side note complete).

To upgrade the look of the tanks I want to blend them more. They are currently mostly solid blue and black with slight blending on the high spots. Most of them were painted about ten years ago so they were before the airbrush and no where near as smooth. I've done some updating on them over the years such as gems or colors. Wave Serpents have some bone panels, Prism's have red and Night Spinners purple. The old Falcon I have is pretty sad and didn't get any extra love. I'll have to figure out what color I want to use as it's other highlight color, it still needs to stay close to my Blue, Bone and Purple overall scheme .. though now thinking about it I could switch the Spinner to green and make the Falcons purple (I paint the Spinners guns greenish). But we aren't there yet ..

I just blended the blue straight up with no mask and then masked the purple (that purple was going to be added to them all.. I haven't started on the highlight panel change or anything)..

But... do you know what isn't fun?

This .. this isn't fun in the least haha.. I only had about two hours of painting time in last night and I'd honestly say 60% of it was masking. 10% painting .. the rest was used somewhere hah cleaning, mixing,.. probably a lot of bitching about masking ..

Once I had it masked up I went over the entire model again with black.

Then started adding in the grey highlights.

I didn't want to go overboard and make it too grey. It should still be black but with some weathering and highlighting.

This is how it sits now, last night before I was done I hit it up with two coats of Floor Finish. I know it might sound crazy but it's a great working clear coat. I will spray this in between coats especially when I'm masking something. I mentioned this to John and Greg at Nova and they appeared to be as skeptical as I was when I first saw someone using it, but I highly recommend giving it a try. (I added a link to Amazon above). Next I'm going to paint some of the smaller areas black and then start on the white lines in the seams. More time consuming fun haha

So far I think it's coming along nicely .. I'm also thinking about if I want to add some kind of design to the hull. I don't know if I want go too big though. I think they can look cool but with all the lines and broken up colors on my tanks it could look odd. I'm thinking about putting the infinity symbol on the side in the small black section by the blue and purple.. I may test that on the old beat up falcon to get an actual feel for the look without messing this up and then masking it up again .. If I do go with this look I have a lot of masking in my future.

I have:
4x Wave Serpents
2x Prisms
1x Night Spinner
2x Falcons (one I'm already masked and one that will sadly not move on to the next design haha)